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- {subhead} Piracy?{def}{p}
- Article by Roger Buckley
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- Just recently I have been involved with accusations of Pirate being yelled very
- loudly and all over a free giveaway programme on the now defunct CU Amiga
- CD27. This CD was the last one issued before CUAmiga passed on to the great
- newstand in the sky and part of it's legacy to the Amiga world was a complete
- fiasco over the Cd's main feature, Cinema4D. The CD contained the full version
- but unfortunately the installer with it didn't work and after you'd struggled to
- get it onto your hard drive it asked for a registartion number. This was also
- missing from the magazine at which point many people consigned the CD to the
- bottom of the drawer.
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- Anyone who bought Amiga Format 117 could turn to page 98 where details of the
- correct installer and a phone number to ring Hisoft and obtain the correct
- registration number. The piracy accusations came about because a man who had
- bought both the relevant magazines but had not rung Hisoft at the time decided
- to help his son with a school graphics course by using Cinema4D. He rung Hisoft
- who told him they were no longer issuing the code number so he appealed to the
- Amiga Format Bulletin for the relevant number, where-upon he was jumped on
- by Ben Vost and dire consequences were threatened for anyone who gave him the
- number. He wanted to see if Cinema4D was suitable for his needs in order to
- purchase the latest edition and not buy software blind.
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- Last year I bought a complete Amiga 1200 system as a back up for mine and
- amongst all the goodies were magazine CD's which I already had. I have been
- selling these, via an advert in AF to people who wish to complete their sets of
- CDs. Does this make me a pirate ? I realise that the CD is not supposed to be
- sold without the magazine but many people, me included bought the magazine
- floppy versions before upgrading to a CD-Rom drive and wish to buy the
- back-issue CDs not now available from AF or CUAmiga. All the people who have
- contacted me have asked for a specific CD number and not the TFX issue or
- Opus 5 issue which leads me to believe they just want to fill the gaps in their
- collections. For me piracy is making illegal copies of commercial products for
- pecumiary gain, not suppling a code number for a free-issue game that the
- person has bought.
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- Also on many CDs are hard-drive installers, many of which remove the copy
- protection or have trainers. The jst and Keith Krellwitz ones all state that their
- fixes will only work with the original disks. Is this piracy? In effect you are
- making an unauthorised copy of the software which was probably never intended
- for hard drive installation. The reallity for me is that games such as Settlers and
- Breathless would not get played if I had to load up floppies and search through
- manuals for the appropriate codes whereas when one click of the menu loads the
- game all ready to play.
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- Email : {bold}rogerbu@callnetuk.com{nobold}
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- {bold}NOTE{nobold} : These ideas are the authors own and the AIO team do not
- always agree with what people say or do. We do however allow freedom of speech
- and so we feel it correct to publish this article submitted to us. If you have
- any ideas on it write to us at, {bold}letters@aio.co.uk{nobold}